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Confessions of a weather geek

At precisely 8 a.m. on March 1, the temperature on my front terrace in High Park was -1.5 degrees, with a breeze from the southeast clocking in at 1.0 kilometre per hour.

I can further report that the relative humidity at 5:08 p.m. on March 5 was 59 per cent and that, as of 6:57 a.m. on March 13, the barometric pressure was 1,021 hectopascals.

It says so right there in my notebook.

As in, the notebook that now sits in my dining room beside a little console about the size of an iPad. The console receives a constant, wireless flow of data from gauges on the terrace, said gauges attached to a makeshift, wooden post.

Which is another way of saying “trouble” — namely, the raised eyebrows and general derision that ensues when someone finds out you’ve got a weather station outside your front door.

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The most recent assessment: “That’s crazy.”

It had seemed like a good idea at the time, March being a notoriously varied month when it comes to weather. You can be shovelling snow then playing tennis in shorts and a T-shirt a week later.

So, what was this March going to be like? How were that month’s vaunted lambs and lions going to sort themselves out? Surely there could be a story in that.

You could, of course, just look at the Environment Canada website. But that might not involve the sort of discipline needed to pay truly close attention. Nor would it give you readings for a very precise location, especially a microclimate like the terrace, which is made of flagstone, nestles against the south-facing stone wall of the house, and is about two metres above the level of the sidewalk.

Perennial herbs like rosemary happily sit there all winter before perking up in spring.

So the weather station, or rather its constituent parts, duly arrived, some assembly required.

Anyone who has ever assembled a barbecue knows what this means: there will be a mystery part left over, one that had gone unmentioned in the instructions.

In this case, the leftover bit is merely a little, circular clamp. But still. It now seems like a sign somehow.

On March 5 at 5:46 p.m., I’m duly writing down the temperature: -0.1 degrees.

This prompts Darling Daughter to opine that her parental unit is akin to Admiral Boom in Mary Poppins, the retired seafarer who has a ship on the roof of his house from which he fires a cannon twice daily. “You’re slowly morphing into him,” says D.D. “Obsessive.”

The following morning, you realize you’ve already jotted down the weather conditions on five occasions . . . before breakfast. You then wander off in search of a mirror to verify the Boom reference.

(Since you’re asking, or not, the temperature was -6.5 degrees and the relative humidity was 77 per cent as of 5:29 a.m. that day.)

Or consider this early exchange.

Wife: “You’re going to do this for the entire month of March?”

Me: “Apparently.”

Wife: “What do you mean ‘apparently?’”

The thing to note here is the tartness of that last remark, as if she were really saying, “What do you mean you’re ‘apparently’ going insane?” because you so obviously are.

Get a weather station, dear reader, and you’re apt to get a lot of this, as when the CBC’s Amanda Lang greets news of my possessing one with a comment so dry that it alters the relative humidity in the elevator. “Congratulations.”

But just when you fear tumbling into the slough of despond, along comes someone like my friend Andy Dunne, one of those characters whose outsized tastes for food and travel make it seem like he’s not so much living his life as swallowing it in great, joyous gulps.

Told of the weather station, Andy doesn’t miss a beat. “Can I come have a look at it?”

And then this, when he does arrive for a peak at the thing: “f-----g superb!”

It turns out Andy once had a girlfriend who worked summers atop Snowdon, the highest mountain in Wales. “They’ve got their own weather station up there and we were sending in readings.”

Originally from Cheshire, England, he’s since lived all over the planet, from Spain to Southeast Asia to the Canadian prairies. You see a lot of weather that way and if, as Andy does, you customize software for a living, then weather geekdom is bound to be a clear and present danger.

He’s the only person I know who watches The Weather Network. “It’s me favourite.”

Am I in danger of becoming the second? Are these my people? Really?

Claire Martin, czarina of all things weather at the CBC, certainly seems to think I have the makings of a true weather geek, although in fairness (to yours truly) this may just be the usual process whereby the known adherents of any cult are quick to embrace would-be recruits. It validates their own cultish behaviour.

Martin used to work in Vancouver, but confides that it’s “not a great place for a weather geek. Nothing happens. It rains.”

She arrived in Toronto in 2004 to set up the CBC’s national weather service, and is now surrounded by her own merry band of meteorologists, even a seismologist, as well as banks of computers displaying weather data from around the world.

She reckons weather plays into most news stories, not just tsunamis but even the funeral of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. (Will it be sunny? Raining?)

As it happens, she and her staff don’t always agree on the forecasts. The previous day, for instance, Martin was convinced there’d be precipitation in Windsor, but a couple of young staffers (rightly) argued the opposite. “Last night they beat my ass, and I love it,” she says.

Becoming a meteorologist just seemed like the most sensible course, given Martin’s frank self-assessment: “I was really good at maths and really bad at English and I have cabin fever.”

So she duly went off to Britain’s University of Reading before taking a master's degree at the University of Alberta.

Which brings us to Martin’s accent. To some Brits, she sounds vaguely Australian. Or she could have one of those hybridized Commonwealth accents, the kind people get from bouncing around between places like New Zealand and India and South Africa and St. Lucia, with a London stint thrown in for good measure.

The surprise answer: She’s cockney, born in Lambeth. It’s just that her natural accent, which still flares up on flights back to Britain, might not be much coveted on the nightly news. Imagine Eliza Doolittle telling us there’s snow in the forecast. You’d soon have “The Lambeth Walk” as an ear worm. (Oh. Sorry.)

The other surprise is that she actually delivers her on-air forecasts standing against a wall in a little room, far from the glitzy studio the big anchors call home.

“When the show’s over, I turn the lights off and lock the door,” she says. “Everyone thinks it’s big and glamorous and no, it’s just a green wall.”

At the glamorous hour of 4:15 a.m. — glamorous only if you’re returning from a party of Zelda Fitzgerald proportions — I’ve barely got out of bed when I find myself jotting things down on a page with “March 23” at the top.

Temperature: -0.7 degrees.

Wind: 0 kilometres per hour.

Barometric pressure: 1,024 hectopascals

Relative humidity: 77 per cent

What does this say about me, apart from a bout of insomnia? Why do I feel obligated to check the dining-room console for information that, in a previous life (i.e. prior to March 1), would have interested me not a whit?

Pre-weather station, life was pretty simple. If, for some reason, you really wanted to know what the weather was like, you stuck your head out the front door, looked about, maybe even consulted the newspaper.

That was it.

Now I can tell you exactly what I was doing at 7:49 a.m. on March 9 because I was noting how the relative humidity was 87 per cent and also this, in parentheses: “likely due to fog off lake.”

Ditto for 7:04 a.m. on March 26, when the barometric reading was 1,020 kilopascals and I’d noted “pressure rising, likely going to be sunny.”

If anything screams, “50-something man in grave danger of weather geekness,” it’s the notebook entries contained in those last two paragraphs.

And it gets worse. I soon found myself comparing various weather forecasts with what was actually happening outside my front door. A kind of victory lap would ensue whenever the forecast was so wildly off course that it might well have referred to some distant continent.

To wit: March 26. The AccuWeather forecast called for the temperature hitting 3 degrees at 2 p.m., but on the terrace it’s 21.3 degrees at that time. Out there, the battle of lions and lambs is no contest, the little white ruminants being so obviously ascendant.

But all this note-taking had a cost, if only the way it seemed to be loosing my inner Admiral Boom on an unsuspecting world. Was the notebook really a kind of diary charting that weird, personal transformation?

As a culture, we don’t prize diaries as much as we once did, and apart from a 1970s journal covering a solo backpacking trip overseas, I’d never kept a diary. Keeping one now seemed worrisome.

Until, that is, I realized what the notebook covered by way of omission, namely, my actual life.

The notebook is silent on the subject of my gleefully watching Arsenal beat Swansea away, which I did via television March 16. Nor does it contain the joke I’d concocted the previous day, which seemed to amuse friends although, admittedly, there may have been beverages involved.

“A Glaswegian, a Geordie and a Scouser walk into a bar. At the end of the night, the place is completely destroyed, the till empty.”

(Pause)

“Naw, I wasn’t surprised, either.”

In other words, the stuff that really mattered in life was happening far from the notebook. If it was any kind of diary, it was an anti-diary at the same time.

There was a kind of relief in that.

David Phillips has a particular fondness for the word “wow,” especially when it comes to all the gauges and sensors out there on my terrace.

Environment Canada’s senior climatologist then starts going on about algorithms and all the calculations I could start doing with the data flowing into my dining room.

It turns out that my (now thankfully averted) weather geekness was merely stage one. Unchecked, it could have got much, much worse.

As a full-blown geek, I might have been deeply upset about March, since it proved a bust on the whole subject of “in like a lion out like a lamb” (and vice-versa). The temperature on the terrace might have exceeded 10 degrees on a regular basis, but not so Environment Canada’s official temperature, taken at Pearson International Airport.

The only lamb-like day at Pearson had been March 10, when the mercury topped out at 13.7 degrees, although downtown, where it’s always warming, March 11 was in double-digits, too.

That’s a far cry from March 2012, the warmest on record. But the 2013 edition of that month did mark one interesting thing. For the previous two years, the average monthly temperature in Toronto had been higher than normal. Not so the month just ending.

March 2013 will clock in almost a full degree cooler than normal, says Phillips.

So, does the great weather maestro have a weather station in his yard, too? Well, no. Phillips lives in a condo.

But even if he had, say, a terrace, the chances of him setting up gauges and sensors out there would still be slim.

“I’m not allowed to talk about the weather at home,” he says.

It’s on account of the missus: “She gets that glazed and distant look in her eyes.”

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